Tag Archives: developers

Steve Jobs will once again take to the stage tomorrow, Wednesday October 20th at the “Town Hall” on Apple’s Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, California to unveil a new round of products and technology previews with his infamous headline-grabbing presentation style. What will be announced? Grapevine consensus appears to have a firm grasp of the big picture, but as to the details….

With a few notable exceptions (the small number of people working on certain projects within Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion,” internal code name ‘Barolo,’ force us to sit on details of those projects until after the Event when even if those projects aren’t mentioned during the Event, they will be known to a wider group within Infinite Loop and leaks can no longer be tied so easily to our sources), what we’ve been told by some of our oldest and most reliable contacts in Cupertino comports very closely with the grapevine’s consensus of what to expect tomorrow:

*Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” as hinted by Apple’s logo for the Event:

….Lion is a collection of long-standing projects, many of them held back from the Leopard and Snow Leopard development cycles because they were too ambitious and too out of sync with Apple’s priorities at the time to make the cut for those releases. Read more

Today, Apple will present several new products to its third party developer community…and through the tremendous press scrunity — not to mention what Steve Jobs recently called (an undesirable) “nation of bloggers” (ahem) — by extension the larger world of its users, enthusiasts and curious potential ‘switchers.’

Some of them will be software, some will be hardware, but most if not all will likely manage to attract their own little cyclonic orbits of controversy.

Here are some of the grapevine’s expectations; stay with us over the week ahead for post-event analysis and fresh dirt on what’s next from Infinite Loop. Read more

A new test build of Mac OS X 10.6.3 has been seeded to developers, with known issues listed as “none.” This typically means that the build is a final test seed and barring major surprises, can be expected to be released in a matter of days. Read more

From time to time, we select a few reader questions to answer as best we can, and today’s comes from Kyle.

Kyle:On your site, you often mention prototypes of Apple devices. I’m kind of curious how Apple works their prototype process. What do the prototype devices look like in the semi-finished state? Do they look like pieces of hardware slapped together by a sloppy DIYer or like the polished devices that we know Apple is famous for?

First, thanks to Kyle for writing in and asking your question. We’re always happy to part the veils of the rumor-mongering process when we can, and give our readers further insight into what it’s like to have unique access & insight into the goings-on at Infinite Loop. Read more

Weighing it at twice the size — 1.3GB vs 655MB — of the previous 10A394 build (itself the first major post-WWDC seed update), Snow Leopard 10A402 has been seeded to developers via Software Update from within the beta-stage Mac OS X 10.6. As usual, Apple’s seed notes were short on details….but reader & source reports have already begun to reach our inboxes and the early reviews are very positive.

Snow Leopard build 10A402 was released with typically minimal fanfare or detail in the seed notes which read only: “This Snow Leopard Developer Preview Update is recommended for all users running the Snow Leopard Developer Preview Build 10A394 or later. This update includes general operating system fixes for stability, compatibility, and security.”

However, within minutes of the update being posted to Snow Leopard’s Software Update, reports began to flow in rapidly from developers and others who are running these latest Mac OS X 10.6 test builds — now in early beta phase following last month’s World Wide Developer Conference where the landmark 10A380 build, essentially a feature freeze and beginning of debugging in earnest, was released. Read more

Today Apple released Snow Leopard developer seed 10A394 through the Software Update system. This is the first Snow Leopard seed to be released in an “update” form through Software Update rather than as a complete separate build from the Apple Developer Connection website.

The download weighs in at 655MB, and requires that build 10A380 already be installed. Apple claims the new build contains the old standby of “general operating system fixes for stability, compatibility and security”, and users are reporting that the new Dock Exposé feature works now.

Rumors’ own beta/nightly-build aficionados and the usual suspects on the grapevine will be spending extensive hands-on time with Mac OS X 10.6 build 10a394 in the hours and days ahead; expect further related posts both on our web site and via our Twitter feed (@MacOSRumors) as information becomes available to us. Read more

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Last Updated: 3:15 EDT(newest updates at the bottom) — Live Coverage is now complete. This is an archive of our postings as of 3:15 PM; more can be found in other posts here on Rumors or by following us on Twitter.

From our Twitter feed: Several readers at the Moscone Center have noted that banners there show the iCal logo w/ the date June 19th…a release date?

Also noted by many attendees on the banners is a new Quicktime X logo. Read more

Breaking reports coming out of the lines waiting for entry into the WWDC 2009 Keynote (media has just been admitted in the past few minutes) suggest that Steve Jobs may have been sighted entering the Moscone Center via a side entrance approximately one hour ago.

Stay tuned to Rumors for updates on this breaking news and ongoing LIVE Coverage of WWDC 2009 here on the Web and also from our Twitter feed, @MacOSRumors!Read more

As Rumors has previously reported, we expect an entirely new family of iDevices to be shipping by the end of the summer — and although expectations for an announcement of new 2009 iPhones are running high today, the actual shipping date of those new phones is most likely at least a few (3-4?) weeks in the future.

We also believe that at least one other group of iDevices, most probably and expanded/upgraded iPod Touch lineup, will be announced today….with at least some models paralleling the feature set of the high-end 2009 iPhone, including:

*One proposed marketing name for the new iDevices was “iPhone/iPod Touch X2,” denoting the “twice as fast, twice as much, twice the features” advancements over 2007/2008 models….

In the case of iPhone OS 3.0, we already have a fairly good idea of its feature set, performance, and reliability from the series of developer betas that have been released over the past several months. Although Apple has not yet made an official statement as to its final release date, there has been none of the hedging that we’ve seen with Snow Leopard; we wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some type of delay, or a “Final Beta” similar to Snow Leopard’s, will be announced today….but the most likely outcome is a release in the near term if not actually today.

Obviously, we’re very excited about that and we know all of you are as well. If we’re forced to wait for one more round of debugging to be carried out and for developers to test their apps against a set of new features, we’ll live…but many things about the dev process thus far, and the state of the mobile operating system itself, suggest that a release is imminent without significant further delay. Read more

As Rumors has previously reported, numerous indications from within the source code of iPhone OS 3.0 Beta releases….industry leaks from suppliers….and Infinite Loop itself as well as reports from reliable sources all over the planet all converge on a few relatively widespread fact-based predictions:

*At least three distinct 2009 iPhones: “3Gx2″ or “3.5G” high-end model with enhanced specs & full support for AT&T’s new 7.2Mbps “Enhanced 3G” cellular data network….an entry-level model more or less the same as today’s iPhone 3G with mostly cosmetic changes and a few tweaks (possibly Bluetooth 3.0, among others), and a third “International” model designed for certain markets such as China which have unique cellular networking standards/requirements.

*Within each model family, there will be at least two pricing/value tiers based largely on storage space (but possibly also storage performance, in some cases); in approximate terms, 8GB 3G $99 — 16GB $149 (3G)/$199 (3.5G) — 32GB 3.5G $299, with a possible additional 64GB tier at $399. Read more

Some have speculated, based on varying degrees of “insider” information, that all iDevices (current 2007/2008 iPhones & iPod Touch models as well as upcoming 2009 iPhones, iPod Touch models and an all-new iDevice sometimes referred to as ‘iTablet,’ ‘iPad’ or ‘iPortal’ which will compete with Tablets and “Netbooks”) running iPhone OS 3.0 when it ships this summer may have more than just the “background notification” features announced at the iPhone OS 3.0 Preview Event in March.

Specifically, several rumor-mongers have suggested that certain apps — either a specified number (two [2] is the most frequently mentioned figure), or a limited range of application types which would fit certain requirements to be “pre-approved” for background-tasking capability by Apple’s AppStore managers.

Neither of these fits very well with Infinite Loop’s style, nor are they consistent in any way with the information we’ve received from our own “insider” sources. Read more

Apple has posted the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update package to its Software Update servers, weighing in at a hefty 449MB just for the incremental update from 10.5.6. Combo packages are also available both for the standard (729MB) and server (951MB) variants from Apple’s Downloads Page.

Readers are encouraged to report on any problems or changes.

From release notes for the standard Delta Update package:

What’s new in this update?

Address Book

* Improves reliability of Address Book syncing with iPhone and other devices and applications.

AirPort

* Improves the reliability of AirPort connections, including improvements when roaming in large wireless networks with an Intel-based Mac.

Client management

* Improves reliability of synchronizing files on a portable home directory.
* Fixes an issue in Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 in which managed users may not see printers that use the Generic PPD.

Numerous sources, and the grapevine at large, are in agreement that Juno is in a nearly completed state — in fact, several developers had already been pulled off the project to join other operating systems development teams (Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” and iPhone OS 3.0) as of last Friday.

But so far this week, there has been no new developer seed nor has the update been released. Historically, for many reasons Apple has chosen to release point upgrades for OS X on Mondays or Tuesdays. In keeping with that trend, it is still possible that we could see a release in the next 24 hours….but at least one key source reports that may not happen.

In fact, this source — who has rarely been wrong, but is not necessarily in a position to know for certain whether any items remain on the Juno team’s to-do list (which was almost entirely minor bug fixes as of last week) — says that it could be a few more days, and there could be one final developer seed to test the associated bug fixes before posting 10.5.7 to the Software Update servers. Read more

Recently, Apple has made some particularly outrageous missteps with regards to its App Store approval process — approving obscenely offensive apps like “Shake the Baby” (only taken down after days of widespread condemnation), while denying apps & updates which are not themselves in violation of Apple’s (perhaps questionable) policies, but rather merely allow access to the same mature-oriented third-party content iPhone & iPod Touch owners can easily get via Mobile Safari. In recent days, Apple has dropped several hints that the enhanced Parental Controls in iPhone OS 3.0 may resolve most if not all of these issues.

Two of the most recent examples of questionable decisions by Apple’s App Store submission moderators (censors?) include the first update to Nine Inch Nails’ wildly popular & innovative “NIN: Access” app, the development of which we’ve followed closely here at Rumors….in that case, Apple moderators cited the ability to download podcasts (which is far from being specific to NIN: Access) which included NIN’s “Closer,” with a single offensive lyric (“I want to f-bomb you like an animal”). Read more